History Play: The Lives and After-life of Christopher Marlowe. Rodney Bolt

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СКАЧАТЬ all, who were often acting in their own self-interest and sometimes with a competition that verged on hostility. Intrigue went on at lower levels too, all the way down to one-man bands – quite literally in the case of one Richard Foley, an ironmaster from Stourbridge who disguised himself as a minstrel and wandered through Belgium, Germany, Italy and Spain collecting information on new iron-founding techniques. Walsingham did eventually persuade Elizabeth to finance his activities, but it was never enough. Perhaps he would have derived some comfort in his poverty-stricken last years to know that technically this royal funding made his network the first ever professional English secret service.

      Intelligence also came in on a casual basis from letter-writers (it was around this time that ‘intelligence’ began to take on the additional meaning of information gathered by spies). Sir Francis had well over a hundred such correspondents abroad every year after 1577. In a sense, this was innocent intelligence, simply keeping him in touch in an age without media, performing much the same function as a newspaper, but its value should not be underestimated. For Elizabeth and her government there was simply no other way, apart from emissaries’ reports, of getting basic news about what was going on in the world. There was a darker side too – secret, more devious, requiring agents with particular skills – and here poets and students were an able bag to scoop from. Writers made good spies: ‘They knew the international language, Latin, and the literary tastes of the day gave them a good smattering of French and Italian. They were mobile people: geographically mobile – young men disposed to travel and to see the world – but also socially mobile. In a class-ridden society, the literary demi-monde floated free, touching at once the back-streets of London and the heights of the nobility.’ So, as a budding poet, Kit was a good catch.

      As regards his activity at this time, again Bene’t account and buttery books are revealing. After the stretch of hard study leading up to his BA he is away again, in the autumn of 1584. There is a discrepancy in the records in that the account books indicate he was away for nine out of the twelve weeks of term, yet the buttery records indicates that he was in college in the second, third, fourth, seventh, eleventh and twelfth weeks. Moore-Smith maintains he was also away for two weeks in the summer. This accords with the idea of a period of probation. After one or two initial forays in the early 1580s, Kit is being more earnestly recruited, tested on short but increasingly important local missions, snooping about in grand houses and taverns before being trusted with work on the Continent at the slightly more reputable edge of the profession. Overseas couriers and agents abroad were paid, on presentation of a warrant signed by Walsingham, by the Treasurer of the Queen’s Chamber, for ‘carrying letters for Her Majesty’s special and secret affairs’ or being ‘employed in affairs of special importance’.

      With his wit, ‘sparkling, sun-bright eyes’, nimble mind and easy manner Kit wore his motley well, mobile and fluid with his friendships, flitting in and out of all sorts of social circles. From snippets – an entry in household accounts, a diary anecdote, a letter deriding ‘the man Marlin’* – gradually a picture forms of the people he is beginning to mix with. We learn of his contact with Henry Percy, his exact contemporary and soon to be 9th Earl of Northumberland – the ‘Wizard Earl’ who built up one of the greatest libraries in the country, who while on a visit to Paris in 1582 had had to write reassuring his father that the exile Charles Paget (an associate of the composer William Byrd) was not trying to convert him to Catholicism. Paget himself had written to Sir Francis denying the charge, and Sir Francis no doubt wanted to keep an eye on the young Lord Percy, especially as his inclination to learning drew him towards the ‘wizardry’ of alchemy, new science and adventurous thinking. Kit was even more intimate with Percy’s close friend and later chief scholar Thomas Hariot, who, it was said, was the first Englishman to smoke a pipe, and from whom Kit picked up the expensive tobacco habit. This was itself tinged with the hue of rebellion. In casting round for a verb to describe the intake of tobacco, the first English users alighted on ‘drink’. It was not until well into the seventeenth century that people began to ‘smoke’ tobacco. This gives us a hint of the attitude those first tobacconists (as they were called) had to the leaf. Using the word ‘drink’ to describe the process indicates a mind-expanding experience. You drank tobacco like you drank in a view, or a new idea. Or the way you drank sack – and the effects were similar. Upright public opinion railed against this ‘filthy novelty’, King James himself damned it as ‘harmful to the brain’. So Kit and his fellow early experimenters with the weed can in some sense be seen as miscreant drug users.

      Through Percy and Hariot, Kit met Sir Walter Ralegh, a gambling friend and intellectual confidant of the earl, who frequented the Northumberland seat, Petworth in Sussex, and whose agent Robert Browne created a rumpus over wine prices in Cambridge in 1585, leading to riots between town and gown and Sir Walter’s personal intervention. Kit also flirted with Ralegh’s arch rival, the handsome young Earl of Essex, Robert Devereux, who had just been propelled into Elizabeth’s inner circle by his stepfather, the Earl of Leicester. At Cambridge he befriended the twelve-year-old Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, the era’s most renowned pretty-boy, whose pink-petal eyelids and long, curled locks would inspire some of Kit’s finest verse. And, in a rare moment of calm, he relaxed at the stationer’s in St Paul’s Churchyard with his old friend Oliver Laurens. Gertrud Zelle argues that Kit also met up with Thomas Watson in London during one of Tom’s brief descents from the Continent, and that Kit was becoming increasingly ‘close with’ Thomas Walsingham, who had returned from France to a large house in Seething Lane, owned by Sir Francis, which served as the London headquarters of the network. Thomas had been promoted and was now in a position of control, a channel through which minor agents could gain access to Sir Francis. One of these informers attendant upon Thomas, wishing ‘secret recourse to Mr Secretary’, was none other than ‘Sweet Robyn’, Robert Poley. In the tangled brier of names that grows to fill Kit’s early life, this is one to be remembered, a bud to be plucked and placed alongside those of Wriothesley, Thomas Walsingham and Tom Watson, as we carefully watch them blossom.

      As this social brier spread, so Kit’s intellectual tendrils curled and thrust themselves in unexpected directions. Friends such as Ralegh and Northumberland encouraged the questioning that had begun during his first days at Cambridge, a journey from the Christian viewpoint where doubt was a sin, to one where it was a virtue. Europe had been rocked by the claims of Copernicus, and the discovery of cultures that seemed to predate the Creation. It was a philosophically alarming world, where two great Christian factions were clashing, but where for people like Kit, God could no longer be trusted. If you wanted knowledge you had to flirt with the Devil. Or worse. It is around this time that rumours grew of Kit’s ‘atheism’ and his interest in the occult. He is supposed to have won over one Thomas Fineaux, who began studies at Bene’t in Kit’s last term there. In a way rather reminiscent of Doctor Faustus conjuring ‘in some bushy grove’, Fineux ‘would go out at midnight into a wood, & fall down upon his knees, & pray heartily that the devil would come, that he might see him (for he did not believe there was a devil) ‘.

      Kit was not alone in his dilemma. Scientific curiosity had doubt as a handmaiden. The question arose that if you could no longer trust God, then whom could you trust? This was a time of psychological turbulence, uncertainty, reinvention – the figures that emerged from it as rock-like have become fixed as cultural icons. It is not for nothing that we now prefer to call this English Renaissance the ‘Early Modern Period’ – it is the period of upheaval during which England’s cultural world was made.

CHAPTER FOUR

       Gentlemen of a Company

      As the recall of Thomas Walsingham to become a controller of London headquarters at Seething Lane in 1584 shows, Sir Francis was, by the mid-1580s, beginning to formalise his organisation and expand. In April 1583 he had three men reporting from Paris, nine from Antwerp, and two from Middelburg and Strasbourg; by 1585 his intelligencers abroad had grown to fifty. СКАЧАТЬ